On reading the updates, especially the rebukes by the German professor who apparently did not tell him he was right, but was quoted as saying so anyway, by NASA experts who say they never heard of this before it hit the press, but were quoted as "agreeing" anyway (and, in fact, they did take Satellites into account), it seems this is once more a case of us morons following a few moronic journalists. Great.
So, in short: I can't trust what I read in the newspapers, and I can't trust what I read on Slashdot. I'll just go back to my lab and close the door.
I doubt the boy is related to Donald Marquardt, who was American.
Marquardt is actually a rather frequent German last name.
Also, while I certainly don't want to hinder this boy's fifteen minutes of fame: Of course it has sensationalist value for a school boy to find this, but it only goes to show that just about everyone who spent more than five minutes on this problem should have realised that satellites need to be taken into account. I find it less impressive that a school boy did so, and much more depressive that NASA didn't get this themselves. And those are the people we pay to do this job...
I actually find it quite intriguing that this sort of thing works at all. As the blurb claims (of course I didn't RTFA):
"The landing area is an ellipse about 62 miles by about 12 miles (100 kilometers by 20 kilometers). Researchers have mapped more than five million rocks in and around that ellipse, each big enough to end the mission if hit by the spacecraft during landing.
Assuming those rocks lie at least somewhat evenly spread apart, that's about one of those big dealbreakers per 4000 square feet. In other words, the spaceship has to be directed with such a precision, it could land in a suburb on Mars and be able to avoid hitting a house. Impressive!
Maybe this is how Anon rolls on 7chan, but the Anon of 4chan simply does not work like this. Perhaps someone encouraged them, but usually such an idea would be met with accusations of using/b/ as a personal army.
What the hell are you talking about?
Man, I thought I was 1337, but it seems those days are gone. Great, now what am I going to do when my dad finds out I don't understand the internet anymore?
I have been teaching undergraduate physics for about four years now. I specifically ask my students to work in groups of two to three, and to hand in their work as a group.
Besides saving the supervisors a load of time during correction, this encourages collaborative behaviour. Good students learn while explaining the subject to their peers. The slower students learn by having in effect a second, more hands-on lecture, by one of their peers. During my own undergraduate years, most of my professors did ask us to work in teams, and I always felt like I was learning much more, while working much more efficiently.
Of course, it is possible for people to "cheat" their way through this. So far, I haven't seen this happen too often, for two reasons: Peer pressure (if you don't contribute to the team, your mates won't want to work with you next term) and actual exam pressure (the final mark consists purely of the exam result, which is of course done by everyone individually). The examples I set are just (and I make that clear at the beginning of term) examples. They are an offer to you to learn something. You can choose not to take this offer up, it's your decision, you're an adult.
I'm amazed that they can apparently measure the speed of spacecraft that's millions of kilometers away, to a precision of 10e-4 m/s. How do they do this? I imagine it must be some sort of interferometry. Still, awesome. If only cruise control (with automatic distance control) was this accurate.:-)
Well, I personally agree that Schäuble (and before him Otto Schily, cynically given his personal history) are moving the German anti-terror effort into a direction I don't agree with.
Having said that, the BVerfG's verdict shows once again that the checks and balances work: The politicians do what (they think) the people want, and the judiciary stop them if they overstep the boundaries the constitutional council set upon this society. For someone like me who doesn't feel his political views well represented in parliament, it's reassuring to see that the system as a whole does what it's supposed to do.
Did you lose your passport too, and if you did would you be in favor of implementing a people tracking database to set it off?
No, but I think it's highly unlikely that I'll forget who I am. As opposed to the names and dates of about ten immunization shots I got when I was between 1 and 10 years old.:-)
Whenever a law is found unconstitutional, each and every politician who voted for it should have his right revoked to be part of the parliament and never be able to be a candidate in any election again.
Oh come on.
Parliament has been elected by the people. They are the highest power[1] in Germany, more powerful even than the federal chancellor and the federal president. You want to give a bunch of judges that have not been directly elected by the populace the power to dissolve parliament? (That's what you are asking for: This law is here because it was voted for by a majority of parliament). That is about the most anti-democratic statement I've seen openly proposed in a while.
I know, I know, this is the internet. But, seriously, think before you type.
[1] In this particular case, we are discussing a law created by a state parliament rather than the federal lower house, but you seem not to be too interested in such details anyway, I take it.
I agree that this practice is questionable. That said, the names gained from "the informant" where only used to obtain search warrants. They won't be used in court: the evidence found during the raids will be. Even if the original snooping will be declared illegal (and it might well have consequences for the agencies involved), it won't help the defendants much in their argument.
Your observation is right: The standard model does indeed show it's history in every corner: It was developed to explain strange experimental findings, not to be a beautiful theory. Nevertheless, it provided a lot of theoretical predictions that were later spectacularly verified.
However, it is hard to come up with "an alternative theory": All we have are those very anomalies. This theory operates on energy scales where you can't just go out and roll balls down your floor, like Galileo did. Every experiment involves either a really expensive particle accelerator, a huge telescope/expensive satellite or an enourmus ball of heavy water buried kilometers under ground. And then, of course, Quantum Theory is really strange, because the world is strange. When you look below the scale of atoms, really weird things happen, and our mind has a hard time even grasping what the equations say, let alone what is actually happening. On a fundamental level, quantum theory even proofs that "the world doesn't exist" (in a technical sense, namely it's impossible to assign attributes, states, names, verbs, to things. Imagine having to build a theory of the world that doesn't involve verbs and adjectives!). Of course there are a lot of attempts to build "clean" new, beautiful theories that explain it all (Supersymmetry, String and M-Theory). The problem is that, so far, many of them have failed to produce anything that could actually be tested in an experiment. Those that have (e.g. Supersymmetry) are eagerly awaiting CERN's results.
The last really beautiful, clean theory though, was probably General Relativity. It's so clear and structured that all the trivia about Einstein pales in comparison. He really was one of the greatest minds of this millenium.
No. The Higgs Boson is a particle that's needed in the Standard Model to explain why certain Bosons (the W and Z) are massive, while others (the Photon) are not, although they all unite to a common field (the Electroweak interaction) at high energies. Some people call the Higgs the "mass giver". I personally never liked that name because it suggests that this Boson somehow carries mass from one place to another, which it does not. It's simply one Eigenstate of the Model after symmetry-breaking that really has to be out there if Electroweak Unification (and thus the Standard Model) are to make sense. If there were no Higgs, all the Bosonic modes of the Electroweak field would have to be massless (so-called "Goldstone Modes"). If this was the case, the Weak Force (which is mediated by the Ws and Zs) would have infinite range, just like the Electromagnetic Field (which is mediated by the remaining mode, the Photon), and that would really mess this Universe up.
But this all has nothing to do with Gravity in the sense of "things attracting each other due to their mass", or rather "mass curving space-time". The Standard Model does not incorporate Gravity in the picture (that's why it's called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, not Physics as a whole). The theory for this force is (still!) called "General Relativity". Despite a lot of really intelligent people (no self-compliments here, I have stopped working in the field as I felt way too stupid for it) trying really hard, we still don't have a generally accepted theory for how Gravity and the other, (quantum) theories can be combined in a principled manner. CERN might help a lot with this but, ultimately, we might have to wait till the big crunch, if it ever comes, to see how all those fields really unite.
But really people, why do we need Star Wars to make this sound cool? This is an amazing universe of ours. It doesn't need George Lucas to make Light and Magic.
I live in Europe, and I have no idea where my immunization passport currently is. I've moved five times in the last twelve months, changing countries twice, so it could be anywhere on the continent, really. Since I've forgot what I was immunized against, the only way to find out is to take blood sample and run it through expensive lab tests.
Same as with tax records, really: Not every paper solution is automatically non-fragile.
Sorry, but it's not FUD. FUD is short for "fear, uncertainty and doubt". None of the three is being spread by CNET in this case.
Come on guys, English is not my first language. Try and keep it consistent for people like me. Call it "CNET is writing rubbish", or something more vigorous.
The Germans (a consortium involving among others Siemens and Thyssen Krupp) have been trying to sell a Maglev train, called the Transrapid for over a decade now. So far, the only customers are the cities of Munich and Shanghai. The thing has a cruise speed of 250mph.
Unfortunately, one big disadvantage of Maglev trains is that they cannot run on standard rail tracks, of course. Rebuilding a whole new track is expensive, especially on long distances. That seems to be the main reason why Germany, France and Japan (the three biggest countries with real "high speed" rail connections) have all opted for traditional trains (the ICE, the TGV and the Shinkansen), which do their high-speed travel on purpose-built tracks but invariably also use older standard rail tracks on parts of their routes.
It'll only be a few years till the Paralympics will be more exciting than the real thing.
And disabled people will be beating up young males in the street.
I, for one... no. I'm not that cheap.
Steep learning curve, then it's a blast
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
The thing with LaTeX is, it's much closer to a programming language (for typesetting text) than to a word processor. That makes it hard to learn, but amazingly easy to use once you have the hang of it.
I have been using LaTeX for about 95% of my texts (including short notes, ToDo-Lists and letters) since 2002. I agree with the OP that it really takes 10 seconds to format a text, when you leave out the actual typing work. It's as easy as typing
\documentclass{article} \begin{document} % Text goes here \end{document}
Of course, doing the layout for something containing your blood and sweat, like a PhD thesis, takes much longer. But still, doing so for my Masters thesis was much less work than having to do so in Word. The reason is that thesises, especially those heavy on maths, are exactly what LaTeX was built for. My thesis had pdf-links in the table of contents, an index, lots of beautiful formulae and a link from newly defined mathematical symbols to their definition earlier in the text, and a lot more. All of which was but a few lines of code, using the right set of packages, of course. But best of all: Although the final pdf output (including big figures) was about 120MB in size, the document never became unstable or difficult to use, as opposed to a Word-Document of that size, on a less than brand-new machine. The whole layouting cost me about 3 days (out of a 1 year thesis). A lot of time was saved on not having to reformat the whole thing several times during production, as the writing phase was automatically separated from the layout phase.
I agree, though, that it's not the tool of choice for a concert-flyer.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, so you're saying a blue bubble with built-in speakers looks like a gray blorb with a built-in keyboard.
I don't know, maybe if you're color-blind and deaf.
Errm... 19% (VAT) of EUR 20.00 is EUR 3.80 ($6.07).
:-)
Maybe you should buy the book? They might have some good reading for you
On reading the updates, especially the rebukes by the German professor who apparently did not tell him he was right, but was quoted as saying so anyway, by NASA experts who say they never heard of this before it hit the press, but were quoted as "agreeing" anyway (and, in fact, they did take Satellites into account), it seems this is once more a case of us morons following a few moronic journalists. Great.
So, in short: I can't trust what I read in the newspapers, and I can't trust what I read on Slashdot. I'll just go back to my lab and close the door.
... can it make me tea?
(With best wishes from England.)
Dude, where did you get the time to write all this stuff?
Get back to work, Slackernerny!
As other readers have pointed out, the Asteroid actually weighs 21 Megatonnes, not 200 Gigatonnes.
Journalists are the only people worse on Maths than both NASA and German school boys.
I doubt the boy is related to Donald Marquardt, who was American.
Marquardt is actually a rather frequent German last name.
Also, while I certainly don't want to hinder this boy's fifteen minutes of fame: Of course it has sensationalist value for a school boy to find this, but it only goes to show that just about everyone who spent more than five minutes on this problem should have realised that satellites need to be taken into account. I find it less impressive that a school boy did so, and much more depressive that NASA didn't get this themselves. And those are the people we pay to do this job...
Man, I thought I was 1337, but it seems those days are gone. Great, now what am I going to do when my dad finds out I don't understand the internet anymore?
I have been teaching undergraduate physics for about four years now. I specifically ask my students to work in groups of two to three, and to hand in their work as a group.
Besides saving the supervisors a load of time during correction, this encourages collaborative behaviour. Good students learn while explaining the subject to their peers. The slower students learn by having in effect a second, more hands-on lecture, by one of their peers. During my own undergraduate years, most of my professors did ask us to work in teams, and I always felt like I was learning much more, while working much more efficiently.
Of course, it is possible for people to "cheat" their way through this. So far, I haven't seen this happen too often, for two reasons: Peer pressure (if you don't contribute to the team, your mates won't want to work with you next term) and actual exam pressure (the final mark consists purely of the exam result, which is of course done by everyone individually). The examples I set are just (and I make that clear at the beginning of term) examples. They are an offer to you to learn something. You can choose not to take this offer up, it's your decision, you're an adult.
I'm amazed that they can apparently measure the speed of spacecraft that's millions of kilometers away, to a precision of 10e-4 m/s. How do they do this? I imagine it must be some sort of interferometry. Still, awesome. If only cruise control (with automatic distance control) was this accurate. :-)
Well, I personally agree that Schäuble (and before him Otto Schily, cynically given his personal history) are moving the German anti-terror effort into a direction I don't agree with.
Having said that, the BVerfG's verdict shows once again that the checks and balances work: The politicians do what (they think) the people want, and the judiciary stop them if they overstep the boundaries the constitutional council set upon this society. For someone like me who doesn't feel his political views well represented in parliament, it's reassuring to see that the system as a whole does what it's supposed to do.
Parliament has been elected by the people. They are the highest power[1] in Germany, more powerful even than the federal chancellor and the federal president. You want to give a bunch of judges that have not been directly elected by the populace the power to dissolve parliament? (That's what you are asking for: This law is here because it was voted for by a majority of parliament). That is about the most anti-democratic statement I've seen openly proposed in a while.
I know, I know, this is the internet. But, seriously, think before you type.
[1] In this particular case, we are discussing a law created by a state parliament rather than the federal lower house, but you seem not to be too interested in such details anyway, I take it.
I agree that this practice is questionable. That said, the names gained from "the informant" where only used to obtain search warrants. They won't be used in court: the evidence found during the raids will be. Even if the original snooping will be declared illegal (and it might well have consequences for the agencies involved), it won't help the defendants much in their argument.
Your observation is right: The standard model does indeed show it's history in every corner: It was developed to explain strange experimental findings, not to be a beautiful theory. Nevertheless, it provided a lot of theoretical predictions that were later spectacularly verified.
However, it is hard to come up with "an alternative theory": All we have are those very anomalies. This theory operates on energy scales where you can't just go out and roll balls down your floor, like Galileo did. Every experiment involves either a really expensive particle accelerator, a huge telescope/expensive satellite or an enourmus ball of heavy water buried kilometers under ground. And then, of course, Quantum Theory is really strange, because the world is strange. When you look below the scale of atoms, really weird things happen, and our mind has a hard time even grasping what the equations say, let alone what is actually happening. On a fundamental level, quantum theory even proofs that "the world doesn't exist" (in a technical sense, namely it's impossible to assign attributes, states, names, verbs, to things. Imagine having to build a theory of the world that doesn't involve verbs and adjectives!). Of course there are a lot of attempts to build "clean" new, beautiful theories that explain it all (Supersymmetry, String and M-Theory). The problem is that, so far, many of them have failed to produce anything that could actually be tested in an experiment. Those that have (e.g. Supersymmetry) are eagerly awaiting CERN's results.
The last really beautiful, clean theory though, was probably General Relativity. It's so clear and structured that all the trivia about Einstein pales in comparison. He really was one of the greatest minds of this millenium.
But this all has nothing to do with Gravity in the sense of "things attracting each other due to their mass", or rather "mass curving space-time". The Standard Model does not incorporate Gravity in the picture (that's why it's called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, not Physics as a whole). The theory for this force is (still!) called "General Relativity". Despite a lot of really intelligent people (no self-compliments here, I have stopped working in the field as I felt way too stupid for it) trying really hard, we still don't have a generally accepted theory for how Gravity and the other, (quantum) theories can be combined in a principled manner. CERN might help a lot with this but, ultimately, we might have to wait till the big crunch, if it ever comes, to see how all those fields really unite.
But really people, why do we need Star Wars to make this sound cool? This is an amazing universe of ours. It doesn't need George Lucas to make Light and Magic.
I live in Europe, and I have no idea where my immunization passport currently is. I've moved five times in the last twelve months, changing countries twice, so it could be anywhere on the continent, really. Since I've forgot what I was immunized against, the only way to find out is to take blood sample and run it through expensive lab tests.
Same as with tax records, really: Not every paper solution is automatically non-fragile.
Wouldn't that make you a sperm martyr?
Sorry, someone had to say it.
Sorry, but it's not FUD. FUD is short for "fear, uncertainty and doubt". None of the three is being spread by CNET in this case.
Come on guys, English is not my first language. Try and keep it consistent for people like me. Call it "CNET is writing rubbish", or something more vigorous.
The Germans (a consortium involving among others Siemens and Thyssen Krupp) have been trying to sell a Maglev train, called the Transrapid for over a decade now. So far, the only customers are the cities of Munich and Shanghai. The thing has a cruise speed of 250mph.
Unfortunately, one big disadvantage of Maglev trains is that they cannot run on standard rail tracks, of course. Rebuilding a whole new track is expensive, especially on long distances. That seems to be the main reason why Germany, France and Japan (the three biggest countries with real "high speed" rail connections) have all opted for traditional trains (the ICE, the TGV and the Shinkansen), which do their high-speed travel on purpose-built tracks but invariably also use older standard rail tracks on parts of their routes.
It'll only be a few years till the Paralympics will be more exciting than the real thing.
And disabled people will be beating up young males in the street.
I, for one... no. I'm not that cheap.
I have been using LaTeX for about 95% of my texts (including short notes, ToDo-Lists and letters) since 2002. I agree with the OP that it really takes 10 seconds to format a text, when you leave out the actual typing work. It's as easy as typing
Of course, doing the layout for something containing your blood and sweat, like a PhD thesis, takes much longer. But still, doing so for my Masters thesis was much less work than having to do so in Word. The reason is that thesises, especially those heavy on maths, are exactly what LaTeX was built for. My thesis had pdf-links in the table of contents, an index, lots of beautiful formulae and a link from newly defined mathematical symbols to their definition earlier in the text, and a lot more. All of which was but a few lines of code, using the right set of packages, of course. But best of all: Although the final pdf output (including big figures) was about 120MB in size, the document never became unstable or difficult to use, as opposed to a Word-Document of that size, on a less than brand-new machine. The whole layouting cost me about 3 days (out of a 1 year thesis). A lot of time was saved on not having to reformat the whole thing several times during production, as the writing phase was automatically separated from the layout phase.
I agree, though, that it's not the tool of choice for a concert-flyer.